There are (too) many options for backing up the contents of a Guest OS virtual disk, and having already lost the contents of one VM that was using Snapshots every few days, I don't trust snapshots as a reliable recovery process if something goes wrong. I haven't tried undo disks yet, but I'm presuming that they use a similar method of committing and reverting changes to snapshots, and consequently are not to be trusted either? (e.g. what happens if I have a power cut partway through an undo?). Next, I plan to let Time Machine backup the Guest OS data as if they were separate hardware on the network, so that even if Parallels completely trashes itself and its virtual drives, in the worst case I can install a new guest and recover the contents from the Time Machine backups. As an aside, I have various licensed software locked to the machine it installs to, so it would be much nicer to be able to recover a whole VM after a catastrophe to avoid remote license deactivation and regeneration of license tokens to get the replacement VM back in full working order. I think that means it might be more sensible (than using actual Guest OS Time Machine backups) to instead let Time Machine backup all the files in ~/Documents/Parallels on the Host OS, and for disaster recovery just step back a day or two in time to copy the pre-disaster versions of those files back. Does anyone else here have a proven backup and recovery system in place for Guest OS's that they would share with me, please? Or any advice over the most robust way to do things in any case? Additionally, it seemed like putting a password on the virtual drives was easier than letting the Guest OS encrypt the virtual drive with File Vault, and less likely to cause trouble. But, again, with the VM I lost, Parallels mounter doesn't ask for the password, it just fails. So... what are the ramifications on Time Machine backups of Guest OS and/or ~/Documents/Parallels on Host OS of using File Vault in preference to the Parallels password protection? At this point I'm slightly afraid of using either, which is a shame - I switched to Mac for it's "everything just works" philosophy.
